Audio and video in slides

PowerPoint allows us to embed one or several Flash or Windows Media players in a slide, so that we can play audio and video and use the pause and volume controls without having to use a player outside the slide.

Open Office Impress doesn’t include this feature. Online presentation software like Prezi offers similar possibilities.

When embedding an online video in a PowerPoint slide, we can play this video from any computer without any problem, unless the video goes offline for some reason or another. If we use a video file saved on our computer the video file to avoid nasty surprises when trying to play it back, then the PowerPoint file and the video file must be in the same folder.

So, basically, there are two different options and processes: embedding and online video and embedding a local file. Please see the tutorials below for further details.

The following slide exemplifies a simple use of this technique: a slide which contains a video clip from Youtube. A textbox with questions about the video can be shown on click, and then comprehension is checked by displaying the answers on a further click. To see how it works, it is necessary to download the presentation using the link below.

Availability and economy: We do not need to spend money on photocopies. Besides, we can decide if we use the activity almost instantly, there is no need to order copies in advance.

Flexibility: We can use all the activities related to a video or just the ones that fit our lesson. Again, this can be decided on the spot. We just need to have the different activities in different slides. The presentation shown above contains only a True or False activity. However, the one below contains different activities. We are free to use everything or only a part of it:

Staging: We often want the students to watch the video first and we ask them not to read the questions. However, if they have a photocopy with introductory activites and the questions, some of them look at the questions and try to answer them the first time the video is shown. Either we hand out the questions on a different photocopy or we cannot avoid their reading the questions at will. If we use PowerPoint, we just need to apply an entrance animation effect to the text box that contains the questions and these questions will only become available when we activate them

The process to embed video changes quite a lot depending on the version of PowerPoint. Pick your tutorial from the list below: